Ever since his debut film Cronos, Spanish director Guillermo del Toro has been the focus of much undue adulation among critics and the Internet community of self-professed horror geeks. The problem is that del Toro’s work thus far simply doesn’t measure up to this kind of talk. Cronos’ biggest novelty…
If you can get past the fact that the central characters of Nickelodeon’s computer-animated feature Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius–the precocious, Chris Isaak-coiffed hero of the title (voiced by Debi Derryberry), his square suburban parents (Mark DeCarlo and Megan Cavanagh) and token, demographic-spanning friends–look like the kind of generic, Mexican-made bootleg…
Novice screenwriter John Scott Shepherd was obviously paying attention in 1999. He no doubt noticed the massive mainstream and critical success of American Beauty and the cult followings of Fight Club and Office Space, and surely said to himself, “Hmmm, this whole thing about cubicle workers being full of pent-up…
Ignore, if you can, the awful trailer for Dinner Rush, now playing in theaters and apparently struck from a grainy work print. Ignore also the simplistic analogies already being made to Big Night and The Sopranos, which prove only that critical quote-hustlers given to hyperbole have noticed the movie contains…
Beneath the hazy, mystifying layers of Vanilla Sky lies a remarkable Tom Cruise performance–one that, to a large extent, takes place beneath a makeup artist’s piled-on scars and a costumer’s blank “prosthetic” mask. As David Aames, hipster publisher of Maxim-like magazines, Cruise plays a lothario so vain he plucks out…
The combatants in Patrick Stettner’s compelling first feature, The Business of Strangers, are a middle-aged software executive (Stockard Channing) wearing a steel-blue suit and an air of professional hauteur; the executive’s mysterious new assistant (Julia Stiles), fresh out of Dartmouth and full of self-righteous aggression; and a cocky “headhunter” (Frederick…
At first look, the cloud of gloom that envelops Lucrecia Martel’s strangely affecting first feature, La Cienaga (The Swamp), seems to have no specific origin and no particular provocation. An alcoholic matriarch, Mecha (Graciela Borges), lolls beside a filthy swimming pool at a decrepit South American villa, sloshing glasses of…
The lights go down, and the puzzlement begins. Ensemble cast of superstars? Check. Loose remake of amusing curiosity? Check. Built-in, prefab sense of cool? Check. A little something for wistful fans of Dino and Sammy? Check. So…wait a minute. Is this The Cannonball Run Redux? With his ambitious but unnecessary…
Written and directed by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau (Jeanne and the Perfect Guy), the disarmingly inventive road movie Adventures of Felix follows the idiosyncratic path of a sweet-natured, gay, half-French/half-Arab youth (Sami Bouajila) who, on being laid off from his jobs, decides to hitchhike across France to Marseilles, where…
Though Behind Enemy Lines, set in Bosnia, was originally due for release next year, already it feels antiquated; that conflict is already a distant memory, a ghost lost in the shadow of the war on terrorism. The film tested so well 20th Century Fox pushed up its release date, and…
Ever endure a friend stuck in a deep depression who refused to lighten up but delighted in spewing ugliness to bring you down? Such is the method of The American Astronaut, a thematically inventive but woefully crude science-fiction jaunt that’s less engaging entertainment for us than perverse psychotherapy for writer-director-star…
A poem, written by an Academy Award-winning screenwriter, ends thusly: “If the Nazis have my penis–who has my arm?” Another begins, “Who rise to adversity, I shit on you.” Another, titled “The Hopping Poem,” reads, in its entirety, “Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck That Hurt, Fuck Fuck.” And another, called “Is…
This is the true story of seven people (Tommy! Annie! Ashley! Maria! Griffin! Carpo! And Benjamin!) picked to live in a city and have their lives changed. Find out what happens when people stop being polite, and start being real. The Real World–Sidewalks of New York. If you came across…
“From Academy Award-nominated director Griffin Dunne…” Wait a minute. Hold the phone. That guy who co-starred with Madonna in Who’s That Girl? The guy who directed the Sandra Bullock witch movie Practical Magic and the Meg Ryan stalker movie Addicted to Love? That Griffin Dunne? Yep, he’s Oscar-nominated. In the…
The pitch for this one must have seemed sensational: “It’s called Spy Game, right, and it’s about this old spy who recounts, via flashbacks, how he mentored this young spy, only now the young spy is captured and about to be killed, so the old spy spends his last day…
Lovely magic, this. An enchanting family classic. If you believe in magic, you’ll love Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. And if you don’t, you will, and you will. True, the hype has been a bit much. And, yes, a mad, desperate world choked with reproduction and reprobation could hardly…
It takes a nimble mind to mix light and dark, to wed humor with treachery, and in Novocaine newcomer David Atkins is not always up to the task. Neither is Steve Martin, who wants to be taken seriously while reserving the right to produce the occasional sick yuk. If you…
Tape, a film by Richard Linklater, isn’t. It’s high time for some cinematic clarification: If a project is shot on celluloid, with light searing images onto emulsion, then it’s a film. If it’s recorded with magnetic frequencies or digital code (as is the case here), then it’s a video. Of…
Two years ago, a colleague of Michael Cain’s asked the founder and director of the Deep Ellum Film Festival just why the hell he named his fledgling fest after a part of town in which there were, ahem, no movie theaters. “There will be,” Cain insisted, like a W.P. Kinsella…
The heroine of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s bold and bracing new comedy, Amlie, is Amélie Poulain, a doe-eyed crusader with the face of a porcelain doll and a sleek helmet of jet-black hair. From her high perch in Montmartre, where she works as a cafe waitress, Amélie secretly resolves to emancipate all…
It is difficult to imagine a more timely film than Focus; certainly, its message about intolerance resonates in a post-September 11 world in ways the filmmakers never anticipated. Adapted from Arthur Miller’s little-known 1945 novel of the same title, Focus looks at what happens to a society when basically decent…
It doesn’t take much probing beneath the thin surface to see Shallow Hal as an apologia of sorts from Bobby and Peter Farrelly. The brothers are known for making movies full of jokes about midgets, retarded people, albinos, the handicapped and so on, but always with the caveat that the…
